The Moment: A Selection

“My wife was ready to have a baby. I was not. Sure, I supported the idea in a vague, abstract way–I wanted to have kids just as I wanted to retire to a house on a lake. Someday.”

Recently, Obamacare’s preventive care mandate has reignited major controversy over female reproductive rights. It really wasn’t all that long ago when active family planning was more of a dream than a reality for Americans (Griswold v. Connecticut—the landmark case that upheld the right to martial privacy—wasn’t until 1965!) Perhaps because of this struggle, modern tales about adults waiting until just the right moment to have children are common. We hear fewer about children who come as surprises to their parents and whose births are unexpected. But as Michael Forster Rothbart explains in his piece for The Moment, sometimes children just happen, and sometimes that turns out just fine, too.